Sioux Falls Free Thinkers endorse Fat Man and Little Boy forshowing that the military had one objective, to make thebomb and test it here, and then somewhere else ona civilian population before the war was over.

Academy Award-winner Paul Newman heads a superb cast in the powerful true story of the creation of the first atomic bombs, called Fat Man and Little Boy. Newman plays Leslie Groves, the hard-nosed general in charge of "The Manhattan Project." Dwight Schultz portrays brilliant, mercurial scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. And Bonnie Bedelia, John Cusack, Laura Dern and Natasha Richardson give compelling supporting performances in this film by Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields, The Mission) that vividly reveals one of history's most dramatic chapters.

8-8-17 The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes. Full stop!The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes. Full stop!There is no justification for killing hundreds of thousands of civilians! Seventy-two years ago this week the United States committed war crimes against the Japanese people on a scale that was previously unimaginable in human history. It is almost impossible to utter this truism in public without being subjected to a chorus of tediously well-rehearsed, half-understood objections learned from high-school classrooms, pop history, and talk radio. The most common form these replies take is that, so far from being acts of state-sponsored mass murder, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were humanitarian missions meant primarily to save lives: Had it not been for the instantaneous slaughter of some 220,000 people (a conservative estimate), mainly civilians, the war would have been unnecessarily prolonged. It was far better, assuming those projected casualty figures, which since at least 1947 have routinely been estimated upward after the fact, to kill a few hundred thousand civilians rather than risk an equal or greater number of dead American and Japanese soldiers. If this would-be lofty motive were behind the bombings, it would certainly have come as a surprise to President Harry Truman and the American people at the time. Nothing could be more grimly clarifying than the words with which Truman broke the news of Hiroshima to the American people, an address worthy of a Star Wars villain in which he made it clear that he considered the attack, and its forthcoming sequel, a mission of revenge and spoke rapturously of the "marvel" he had unleashed upon the Japanese and the "achievement of scientific brains" that had made it possible. (Webmaster's comment: The American military wanted to test their new mass killing weapon on targets that had little bombing damage so far (because they had little military value) to see their effects on unspoiled targets. So goodby to 220,000 mostly innocent lives thanks to the American military! One of the worst war crimes ever! And we hold our nuclear power over the rest of the world. And we will probably be the first to do it again!)

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Fat Man and Little Boy

Sioux Falls Free Thinkers endorse Fat Man and Little Boy forshowing that the military had one objective, to make thebomb and test it here, and then somewhere else ona civilian population before the war was over.